The Writing Life

Once upon a time, the popular image of Somerset Maugham was of a debonair gentleman novelist living in his villa on Cap Ferrat with a society bride and a view of the Mediterranean. Selina Hastings’s extraordinary biography, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (Random House), lends much-needed complexity to that image, exploring his profound bond with his American secretary and lover, Gerald Haxton, as well as his side career as a spy during WWI. Drawing from Maugham’s private papers and observations by his embattled daughter, Liza, Hastings, as shrewd an observer of character as her subject was, spins a compelling story that encompasses two world wars and friendships with people as wide-ranging as Charlie Chaplin and Virginia Woolf.

As a highly respected literary editor, Diana Athill has lent a sharp eye to everyone from V.S. Naipaul to Margaret Atwood, but in her freshly republished memoirs, it’s her own life that comes under graceful scrutiny. Written in the sixties, Instead of a Letter (Norton) recounts the defining heartbreak of her life: a romance with a charismatic student at Oxford, a member of the RAF. He abruptly broke off their engagement, married another woman, and died in the war shortly thereafter, his actions unexplained. “My soul shrank to the size of a pea,” she writes, recalling the dissolute postwar years that preceded her professional success. A very different but equally disorienting affair is key to Athill’s later memoir, After a Funeral (Norton). Originally published in the eighties, it recounts her obsessive affair with a wealthy, enigmatic Egyptian, whose fatal charm masked a stable of demons. Taken together, the twin memoirs are like letters from a wise friend, one who understands how writing might save you from your own sadness.

Few authors are as overdue for a revival as Pearl Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1938). She gets her due in Hilary Spurling’s assured biography, Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth (Simon & Schuster). The precocious daughter of a missionary, Buck grew up in a Chinese village where she would often find the remains of abandoned baby girls in the woods. English was her second language, but she learned it quickly, falling in love with Dickens (whose work she would annually reread). Spurling focuses on Buck’s hardscrabble early years and the experiences that would later take root in her work—an astonishing 39 novels and 25 works of nonfiction. Published in 1931, The Good Earth revealed two mutually unfathomable cultures to one each other. Buck became an instant celebrity in America, where she was constantly under suspicion of being a communist; the book was banned in China, where she was accused of being an imperialist.

A trio of anthologies rounds out the list: James Baldwin’s The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (Pantheon), available at the end of August, a selection of letters, reviews, and essays, as well as a speech in which he muses on the possibility of an African-American president: “What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be the president of.” Nadine Gordimer’s Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008 (Norton), the Nobel Prize winner’s first edition of collected nonfiction, brings together personal history, literary criticism, and fierce social observation, underscored by the same themes found in her fiction: the intersection of private lives and public events and the indelible scars of apartheid. And finally, the perfect late-summer road-trip accompaniment: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (Viking), edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, captures the Beats’ esprit de corps at its most exuberantly unfiltered, in missives that go from virtuosic to hilariously self-indulgent. As Ginsberg writes, “Art has been for me, when I did not deceive myself, a meager compensation for what I desire.” He was all of 19 at the time.